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The Goodbye Song

Book by Karl Kristian Flores · 11 quotes · The Goodbye Song, Sadness, Loneliness

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The Goodbye Song Quotes

“Diary, do you know the best part of an ice cream bar? It’s the end part after you’ve eaten most of the bar, where the rectangular base chocolate flake pokes out. You have to tilt your head and bite off the bottom scrap of chocolate. Yeah. That place. I always lick it a few times too. Why is it so interesting? Because it’s definitive...it’s something again. The whole bar is predictable until you reach its finale, where the texture is its own. If people were ice creams, most would slip out of the stick, never deciding to be, never knowing they haven’t decided. We must be our own surface.”

“Look out the window. You ask yourself: how are we actually supposed to live? After we’ve eaten and slept well, what is there for us? Is this life supposed to be a kind of animal that fills itself with things like lunch, TV news, occasional travels, and then dies? Like a mortal doll poked with the same colored thumbtacks as everyone else. Eat. Masturbate. Heartbreak. Sleep. Perhaps the answer to a deep boredom is community—but what good are two people but another person to eat lunch, watch TV news, and travel mediocrely with, and also die? Humans don’t know their origins, which explains why we’re always confused and longing for some unattainable dimension from 18 to 80. Can we ever be more?”

“He decided to spend his time dancing around the block. In this sequence of joy, every material object to him had the same value. He’d walk around knocking things over because they didn’t matter. They were just things. His outlook and the universe were always bigger. There was no stopping a person who minimized what ought to be minimized. Charlie couldn’t be fooled by constructs. There was something precious about the hands that held a glass ornament the same way they held a boulder. Something rare and admirable in its innocence and fearlessness.”

“The wide-eyed professor lectured, on the verge of tears, and when class ended, the students closed their notebooks shut and asked of her plans for the weekend, which was answered politely, but with a tinge of sadness, for the professor feared her personhood, which had in her lesson plan existed truly only minutes ago, was already being reduced to the small, meaningless matters of tomorrow.”

“Regret isn’t a strong enough motivator. They tell you to travel because if you don’t, you’ll regret it down the road. And so everyone did things that stemmed from a negative origin. Sex because I’ll get old. Dieting because I’ll get fat. Work because I’ll be poor. Success to prove my doubters wrong. But desire must derive from the action. It must be the thing that supplies us with a reason. The rest is negative fuel. We must jump over the crack in the cliff not because we’d regret never doing it, but because the other side of the rock calls to us. We must be drawn to the activity itself and let today lead us, rather than allow an invisible future do the haunting. We must live in additions. There’s a difference between “Oh, at least I don’t regret it” versus “Wow, that was a beautiful train I took.”

“The reasons of even the tiniest human gesture are the only thing that separate us from a rock that falls because of gravity. Reasons are all we have, so we might as well make them beautiful ones. Everything expires, except our decisions. Choice is immortal. They are like indelible soulwaves to the universe. Why climb higher and higher when you can ride the straight, rare line that is truth?”